Israel's Defense Line: Her Friends and Foes in Washington

Israel's Defense Line: Her Friends and Foes in Washington

Israel's Defense Line: Her Friends and Foes in Washington

Excerpt

The Washington lobby for Israel made a decisive contribution in the struggle to establish Israel, to sustain her, and to help her achieve peace. This book tells the story of how and why our lobby came into existence, the role played by the American people and the American Jewish community in particular.

Our Jewish community faced a challenge in 1942. Numbed and helpless bystanders as Adolf Hitler waged his demoniacal war against the Jewish people, embittered by our failure to rouse the democracies to deter Hitler, to rescue and open doors to those who might be saved, American Jews assumed their responsibility during World War II. Despite the opposition of the Department of State, they made a commitment to establish an independent Jewish state where Jews could live in freedom and security.

American Jews numbered six million. Six million Jews were lost in the Holocaust. Six hundred thousand Jews were living in Palestine, and, as the war neared an end, that small remnant faced the possibility that solemn promises would be violated, and that they too would be abandoned to their foes.

During the First World War, many American Christians and Jews, as well as the United States government, had been sympathetic to the restoration of the Jewish national home in Israel. But American diplomats cooled with the rise of Arab nationalism, the discovery of oil, and the growing vulnerability of the Middle East -- first to the Nazis, later to the Communists, and, in recent years, to anarchic terrorists.

In the decade preceding World War II, the British government was guilty of ignominious appeasement of the Nazis; and then of the Arabs, because they feared that Arab leaders would join the Axis. Breaching World War I